[TYPO3-english] Question about extension vs FCE

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

First of all, by replying on a posting (in your case by Frédéric 
Ollivier) and changing the subject you are in fact hijacking the other 
thread. Furthermore it might reduce your chances of getting an answer 
because many people mark threads in their newsreader as interesting or 
not interesting, etc.

On 3-11-2010 19:01, Bonneville, Douglas wrote:
> On page 391 of the Packt Typo3 book, it says that Flexforms can't really
> be used for data processing because they aren't really fields in a
> database you can query, just blobs of XML:
>
> "Flexforms are not really suitable for data that needs to be selected on
> the basis of it's content." p391, Typo3
>
> If I create a FCE, all my fields are really Flexform data, right?

Correct.

> If I want to consume the content from an FCE on several different pages,
> sorted by a category or some other criteria, it seems that is not
> possible, because you can't query the FCE content and "SELECT where
> [some criteria]". Is that right?

You can't easily do that, unless you know exactly what you're looking 
for inside the XML. That's not the purpose of an FCE.

> Yes, I'm new to Typo3.

I would have guessed so; most people who know TYPO3 write it as "TYPO3" ;-)

> If that is the case, and I need to be able to sort custom content by
> it's fields, do I need an extension, period? I need to consume one kind
> of master content item by different criteria on many different pages,
> and I'm not sure what Typo3 can do or what the best solution is, at this
> point. In some other CMSs, this is trivial, but approaching Typo3 is
> daunting. It *must* be able to easily do this!!

If you need to do interesting things (selecting, sorting) by different 
fields of a record then FCEs are probably not right for you. In some 
cases you can use the records of an existing extension (tt_news has 
records which can be used for many different purposes) or you can write 
your own extension.

If you feel more comfortable in a different CMS that may be the best 
solution for you.

There are many ways to display data. In many cases you can use 
Typoscript to make custom list and process the data.

> If FCE's are not searchable / sortable by the data they contain, what
> use are they? It seems they would only serve a purpose where manually
> sorting the entries in the page view is sufficient. Is that a fair
> assessment?

FCEs are very useful for editors. You can easily build forms with all 
kinds of fields (even areas which can contain other content elements) 
which can be mapped to parts of the HTML template. Or you can use the 
data in Typoscript to make all kinds of things, such as links, images, etc.

It can be very useful to make FCEs for different column layouts which 
and editor can simply place in the content area and then fill the 
columns with other content elements.

If you need to have images with semi-transparent parts and text in the 
image you can do this with an FCE.

There are a lot of situations where FCEs can be useful. They are not 
meant as general purpose data containers.

-- 
Kind regards / met vriendelijke groet,

Jigal van Hemert
skype:jigal.van.hemert
msn: jigal at xs4all.nl
http://twitter.com/jigalvh